Biking to Guardamar

I think I have finally recovered from our bike trip a week ago to Guardamar. Saturday morning was a crisp fall day, and it just seemed perfect to go out biking on the path that follows alongside the Rio Segura to Guardamar and the Mediterranean. I had a semi-new bike, which I had bought several months ago and tried out quickly on a street near the cycle shop in Ciudad Quesada. I soon discovered,though, that a graded pavement in a town is not quite the same as a packed and rutted river bed. Smooth this trip was not.

Nevertheless, the 20-kilometer ride to Guardamar was enjoyable.  We found a wonderful Mas y Mas supermarket, with cafetería, for a cup of café con leche on the outskirts of the city. After tanking up with caffeine and cooling off with the air conditioning, we continued biking through the almost deserted streets of the city (at 11:00 AM Saturday morning) and came to the fishing pier and the pleasure boat marina. I wandered down to a small swimming cove for my annual dipping of the toe into the Mediterranean. It was delightfully warm, but the uneasy sensation of sand breaking away from beneath my feet as the tide swept out reminded me without a doubt that I learned to swim in a pool, not in the ocean.

We watched dozens of people fishing on the dock that juts out toward the lighthouse, and then, as we came back to the mainland, the clock struck 12:00 and we needed a little something to eat. We shared a Mediterranean tuna cazuela with delicious just-heated baguette--if I had known how good the bread would be I never would have said "no" to the offer of extra.

Then we headed back, but not without a detour through a brand new park project that had just been created from January through April of 2010. Actually, the new project is an elevated wooden walkway through the Alfonso XIII park on one side of Guardamar, shown here with a view of the usual photographer of Sundays in Spain.

After that green respite, we were back on the bikes for some serious pedaling. Twenty kilometers to Guardamar also means twenty kilometers back from Guardamar. We stopped once for another agua con gas--the weather had turned hot in the early afternoon. Not counting the stop, it took an hour to get back to our car in Rojales, but then it was only a ten minutes' drive home. My backside was really sore. Neither one of us did much of anything for the rest of the day. I'm not sure when my next bike ride will be, but I didn't suggest anything this weekend.